[tex-live] Better ways to find packages and documentation

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Florent,

On Fre, 06 Jul 2007, Florent Rougon wrote:
> > I am schizophrenic, I am not thinking about this NOW. Here my primary
> > obligations are with TeX Live for now. Adaptions for OS packaging should
> > follow.
> 
> IMHO, this is short-sighted. If fmtutil.cnf had been thought with

Yes and no. I don't want to burden TeX Live with stuff that is only
necessary for Debian.

> > Even if it is in principle better to use xml, it is still some practical
> > decision about who is programming this stuff. And that is Karl,
> > Reinhard, and me.

[what I meant here is the infra structure and installer, of course you
count, too, when you write something. And thus we can also adapt to your
wishes, of course. Those doing the work have the right to ask for
something. ]

> Right, my intent has never been to change your format; I'm not that
> arrogant. It was mainly to ensure that future versions do embed the data
> I'll need, and to reduce your work by telling you *now* what I need,
> instead of later when the formats are more difficult to change because
> more things, such as the installer, rely on them. I only pointed out in
> a few places how XML would make things more robust, but that's it.

That's the reason why I want to have all this packaged up in some perl
modules. The underlying structure in fact is not important at all. If we
want to switch later on to xml, why not. We can do this, and export more
functionality for those who need.

For the installer all this is for now *definitely* not needed. Keep in
mind (probably you don't know), that *ALL*
installers/repackagers/distributers BUT Debian used the list files,
which are plain text representations generated from the tpm files,
extremly simple ones indeed. Only Debian (=me at that time) actually
used the tpm files, so I know how to parse these beasts ;-).

We want to start with the minimum necessary, but packaged up so that we
can extended it later on. Reinhard is writing the installer, hopefully
using the perl modules. If something is missing, I will implement it. If
we need some changes to the format, no problem. 

Same with you, write, and if you need some changes I will try to do
them.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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